A few days ago, I ran a poll inside my Daily Email House community that went… nowhere.
A member, Neil Sutton, had suggested creating little 3-4 person accountability groups. I somehow called them “pods” and ran a poll to see if people would want to participate. The results, from a group of 480 members:
6 people voted “Yes! I love the idea, please make it happen!”
2 people voted “No! Other people are just barnacles slowing down the gleaming ship that is my life”
7 people voted “Ew? I mean, maybe? It would depend on who exactly I’m matched with in my pod”
I’d call that a fail, and I blame the “pods” naming misstep. Some more failures i’ve had in the past couple weeks:
– Psych Psundays. I introduced this series of Sunday emails, ran it for 3 weeks, ran out of ideas and apparently reader interest, called it quits
– Vitriol Wednesday. Based on another Daily Email House member suggestion. Designated a day to pile on hate on a guru in the industry. Lukewarm hate at best. Called it a fail that I won’t repeat.
– Auction for Svet Dimitrov. I had the idea for copy chief Svet Dimitrov to run an auction to help people get copywriting clients. Svet floated the idea to his list and I floated it to mine. Again, lukewarm interest. Call it a fail (though Svet did get a number of coaching clients out of the exercise nonetheless)
– Auction for Copy Riddles resell rights. I floated the idea to my list and inside Monetization Nastermind, another Skool group I run. Again, not enough interest to run an auction. Fail.
Did you notice any or all of these failures? If you did noticed, did you remember any of them until now that I brought them up? And if you did, did you gloat and cackle at at any of these failures of mine?
I doubt it.
In my experience, nobody notices your failures, and if they do notice, nobody remembers.
And yet, I can tell you that each time I start a new project, particularly one that will be out in the open like a poll or a launch or an auction, each time the thought comes to me:
“What if it’s a big old failure? And what if a bunch of people see me fail?”
In other words, all I’ve really developed, in place of a thick skin, is a moderate ability to act in spite of feeling stressed about what will happen if I fail.
The feeling has never really gone away.
And that’s important to remember.
If you’re waiting to stop feeling nervous in order to act, odds are you will never act.
On the other hand, if you act, and if it produces a success, you’re almost sure to be filled with excitment and even confidence.
And if you act, and it produces a failure, the feeling will be much less stressful than the expectation of that failure… plus, like I said, few people will noticed and nobody will remember.
And while I’m on the topic of public service announcements, a reminder that the kickoff of my tour de commandments event is happening in 4 days
To celebrate the 1-year anniversary of this book, and possibly, my 100th review, I will be kicking off a Tour de Commandments event on May 11th.
I’ll have more details about this exciting, unique, spectacular, historic, one-time, never-to-be repeated event over the next few days, as the countdown to the start gets closer and closer to zero.
Meanwhile, if you haven’t yet gotten your copy of my 10 Commandments book, your copy is waiting for you here: